Beds

When I came home from the hospital as a baby, I slept in a bassinet at the foot of my parent’s bed. Their bed was called a “Hollywood” bed. This meant it consisted of two twin beds tied together by a single headboard. This style bed was used by the motion picture industry to show pictures of a husband and wife in bed together although the actor and actress were not married to each other.

Of course, I eventually outgrew the bassinet and presented my parents with a new dilemma. Luckily, when my father built their little house, he had presented my mother with a very large walk-in closet. Soon a new closet was built and the walk-in became my bedroom. On one side was the closet, Dad built a bed for me. This was a platform with a mattress on it that went from wall to wall on three sides with an aisle beside the “bed”. On the other side of the aisle was a second bed that became my brother’s when he arrived three years after me.

When I was five, we moved from the Little House to a nice big house. Now I had my own large bedroom and needed a real bed. My new bed was a “rope” bed and was very unique. The sides were round (like logs) that had the ends machined into a “screw” pattern. There was a left-hand thread on one end and a right-hand thread on the other so the pieces could be screwed together. The headboard was a flat piece but the footboard was round. On all four sides there were holes with wooden pegs driven in. A rope (my parents used a clothes line) was woven back and forth around the pegs to form a sling for the mattress. It was definitely an antique, but I have no ideal where my parents bought it. This bed was very comfortable-almost like a hammock.

I slept in my rope bed for many years and even took it to college with me when I rented an apartment with two friends. However, eventually I got married and my beloved rope bed just would not do. We dug out my parents’ Hollywood beds and Hubby and I used them for a number of years. After the birth of our daughter, waterbeds became all the rage. The Hollywood beds were returned to storage and were replaced by a king size waterbed.

The waterbed lasted me until my move to Nebraska. Upon arrival here, I ended up with a single size bed on a collapsible metal frame. The other night, about 1 a.m., I was having trouble sleeping and decided to scroll on my phone. As I sat there, all of a sudden, Kabang! The foot of the bed collapsed! Sitting downhill I decided to keep scrolling. Then Kaboom! The other end collapsed. “Oh well. Looks like I’m sleeping on the floor,” I thought.

This was fine until about 4 when Nature called. That was when I realized that, at my age, getting up off the floor when you are still half asleep is not all the easy!

I guess my bed will be the couch until I get my bed fixed. Maybe I should just put the metal frame on cinder blocks.